Our Customer Feedback Team ensures robust complaints handling, focusing on learning from both complaints and compliments to share best practice across our services.
Our Customer Feedback Team ensures robust complaints handling, focusing on learning from both complaints and compliments to share best practice across our services. We are committed to transparency and accountability, regularly publishing complaints data through our magazines, digital bulletins and website. In 2024/25, like so many others in our sector, we saw a continued rise in complaints, reflecting ongoing pressures – particularly on our repairs service. Despite these challenges, we remain focused on resolving issues and delivering excellent service.
Between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, we handled 2,161 complaints – up from 1,852 the previous year. Of these, 283 (13.23%) progressed to Stage 2, including 48 cases carried over from 2023/24. The majority (87%) were resolved at the first stage.
Great Places received 22 determinations from the Housing Ombudsman service in 2024/2025. Each determination can have a number of findings and outcomes which include maladministration. The HOS identified 52 findings from the cases they managed; of these, 16 related to maladministration and 11 to service failure.
| Number of Housing Ombudsman Service referrals | Per cent of total complaints | Service failures upheld | Maladministration upheld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 22 | 1.01% | 11 | 16 |
| 2023/24 | 22 | 1.18% | 14 | 22 |
These findings are used by the HOS to calculate our overall maladministration rate, which for this period was 60%. This is lower than last year when we reported a rate of 76%.
A review of our complaints service was one of our five first year Corporate Plan priorities, along with our repairs service. This has been influenced by customer complaints themes and trends, as well as customer feedback through our engagement and involvement projects. Our new Continuous Improvement Forum is now responsible for using learning from complaints and customer feedback to improve services. They will continue to work with customers to co-design any improvements around service delivery, customer communication, changes to policies, procedures and contract management. Improvements will be monitored by our Customer Committee through their TSM and bespoke performance dashboard.
Some examples of what we have done this year include improvements in our communication with customers around repair appointments, and we are continuing to focus on this in our repairs service review. We have also updated a number of policies and procedures based on our customers’ feedback. This has included our Tenancy Management Policy, which covers a number of matters relating to customers’ tenancies.
Customer feedback has also influenced the procurement of contracts in our Asset teams. Customer cases studies are used at the tender and evaluation stages. Customer feedback is used to measure and monitor successful contractors’ performance.
The Top 3 areas we received complaints around from 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2025 were:
Repairs
Customer Experience
Compliance/Gas related
Our co-design engagement model is doing best what matters most. In 2024/25 our Customer Involvement Team has worked with colleagues and customers to provide opportunities for customers to be involved in designing and influencing our offer. This work has included:
In response to The Building Safety Act 2022 we have produced individual resident engagement strategies tailored to each of our eight higher-risk buildings (those 18m or more in height, or seven or more storeys). Customer feedback was crucial in producing the final plans. This involved contacting customers and sending over 1000 contacts via email, text, postal surveys, posters and support from local teams and community partnership colleagues. We also held a programme of engagement activities at the buildings to launch the strategies with customers and answer related questions about the strategies, their homes and communal spaces.
In response to customer feedback on information provided when moving into their homes, we invited over 1,500 customers to share their views on our existing Home User Guide. Customers’ responses resulted in the creation of a revised Home User Guide and changes to the onboarding process to improve customers’ experience of moving into their new home.
Customer engagement has been a crucial part of a comprehensive end-to-end repairs review, which is a key priority for the business in the first year of our new Corporate Plan. The first stage of customer consultation was completed in early January and February 2025. This saw 524 customers respond, telling us what is important to them about our repairs service. This feedback has been crucial to ensure we are focused on improving the areas identified by customers. We will be carrying out further consultations during 2025 and 2026 and involving customers in the codesign of the service and improvements.
We started our customer consultation on how we handle reports of anti-social behaviour in 2022. In 2024 we asked customers how they feel about the service following a number of improvements, including how reports of ASB are triaged and advice given at the first point of reporting. Customer feedback was positive and is reflected in the customer satisfaction scores for the Tenant Satisfaction Measure relating to our handling of anti-social behaviour (TSM TP12), which has risen from 61.5% last year to 70.8%. We will continue to engage and listen to customers’ feedback as part of our ongoing commitment to service improvement.
